


Variations of A Life

by rothalion



Category: Army Of Two (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3507884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rothalion/pseuds/rothalion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Salem's autobiography, written in real time, as he tries to find some sort of absolution and order to define his life. Post The Devil's Cartel, in my Resurrection universe. The dates for the series are inconsistent so, there will be a bit of liberty with age and timeline. It will draw from scenes in all of my other works as well as add backstory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_ Variations of a Life _

_Reflection_

_a  
_

_Prelude_

 

      It’s an odd thing to grow old and reflect back upon your life’s journey and what it made you. Old, well no, not so much old, but instead rather maybe aged. I’ve aged. I have aged and now, with too much time on my hands I just seem to sit and think. I sit and think about how I became the man I am and how I failed to become the man I probably should have. So, I sit and try to put into some twisted perspective all of the variables that acted upon me to render me into the sum of my life’s equation.

      It came to me, this idea, or rather this memory of a life equation, in a dream I had some weeks ago, while dozing beneath a large Weeping Willow tree anchored into the bank along the sparkling, mountain spring fed river that winds and wends its way through my land. My land, that statement too is one that I find to be quite out of the context of my life, because for nearly all of that life I considered very few things to truly be mine, least of all my ‘life’. But, this dream memory was one which recalled a time, long ago, when a friend’s child surmised that we were all like the numbers of the set of Real numbers. She explained to me in a voice far too firm and sure for a child of her age, that we were simply members of the set human and therefore, she proposed and quite frighteningly did a fine job of explaining, that just like the variables and functions, which act upon the set of Real numbers changing their value; our lives too were subject to the variables and functions which we encountered. Heady thoughts for a twelve year old, but the memory of that conversation, while dozing blissfully with nothing else besides the burbling of my river and the comforting snuffling of my ground reigned horse got me thinking. I was just as she’d described, that and we are all like books. We are books bound in the thread of our experiences and sorted into volumes. These life volumes hold the proofs defining the equation of our life.

      I came away from that dream with a burning nearly debilitating need to un-tangle my lost life. I came away from that moment with the profound sense that if I reflected, long enough and with enough purity of soul, upon the proofs defining the sum that I had become, I might finally find the peace I’d sought out for all of my lost life. So, I will write it all out. Every painful, grievous, angry, terror filled morsel of it. There may be a bit of joy and laughter too but… I will set the variables into matrices and write out formulas to interpret how they acted upon me. If nothing else, I’d prove to myself that I am a man wrought not by personal desire or the ache of bitter regret, but instead a man who had simply been too weak to act in his own defense, a man who’d allowed life’s often grim functions and variables to shape him, instead of taking the formula into his own control. I will prove that, for me, the only solution to the equation of my life was to insure the happiness of the people I’d so freely and completely given my heart and soul to. If I can do that…I can leave this miserable life believing that I served a finer purpose than living for myself alone and maybe God might even see my words and forgive me all of my failings. I think that some lost and childish part of me would like that, needs that absolution.

_Salem: March 8 2015_

 


	2. Chapter 2

_March 8 2015_

_Part 2_

_Bookends_

_1215 hours_

 

      So, moving along…I have only ever loved two people in my life. There have been others who found a place with in my heart, but just two that fit my definition of love. Love is an objective and devastatingly amorphous ideal. It is an ideal and a sentiment bandied about with far too little sincerity. People love to shop. They love Pistachio ice cream or Filet Mignon. They love their first through fifth wives and they love their best friend’s wife despite the love they proclaim for the best friend. Love is a jaded and bitter bed fellow and despite my disdain for it, I have to admit that in the equation of my life, love, with all its good, gross and disparaging connotations, was the primary function defining that equation. I have loved, but two individuals, and those two men were, and I suppose are, the bookends which support the volumes of my life.

      The first I loved as a brother and for a long while desired as much more, but painfully lost to being _just_ my brother. The love between us, that I desired, did not fit into his equation. The second man, I just _loved_. Names are of no importance just yet. There’s time enough for that. Time is all I have left, it seems, and far too much of it.

      It’s difficult to know where or how to begin working the proof of your life. Do you begin at the end and wander your way back to the start, struggling beneath the shadow of your often cloudy memories? Or, should I begin at the beginning, when I was simply X =, still an inequality untouched by the variables that shape us. If, it’s a mathematical formula; then, I think I need to begin at the beginning, but preface that self-deprecating leap into self-explanation by stating; that my love for these two men, defied all attempts of cancellation from my equation by life’s twisted variables. I still love them today just as un-conditionally and with my heart just as naked and stripped of judgment, as I did so long ago in the beginning of our journey. I am the sum of the proof of my love for them. I am both the physical and if you will allow it, the spiritual embodiment of my love for them, wrought in the battered and torn flesh and blood which makes us members of the set humanity.

      The beginning is or should I say was a dark place. The beginning is or was only one of several beginnings really. I feel like I am rambling. I am rambling. I feel like my words are neither true nor false or sensible by definition, but that will just have to be the way of this project. I re-read the first little chapter and the words sound so distant from how I’d speak or describe the world. What have I become? Have I become X= once again? I guess now, with so much time at hand, I can finally see the beauty of things. I can see and admire my great Willow and the clean pure river it watches over. No, maybe I always saw. Maybe, I just tamped that stuff down the same way I tamped down the bad stuff. What a waste.

      I am, or became, well we all were and are part of a population of men who spend their lives hidden in the shadow of civilization, fighting and dying and suffering so, that the rest of you, the weaker members of our _set,_ the set Human, can live good lives. We were soldiers. We were soldiers in many variations and manifestations, some good, some bad and a hell of a lot of gray. I find it strikingly ironic that Badger communities are cetes. To be a Badger, and many men considered me more Badger than man, is to be a part of a cete. To be a Badger means that you will die to protect your cete. So I died. I died more times than I can count. I suppose we all died. We died in droves. We were are soldiers, mercenaries, all men who put the lives of our set, the set Human before our own. But, mostly we suffered. I suffered. Oh, how fucking bitterly I…

      But, I was talking about the beginning though, and lost my way. I don’t want to cave in to my anger just yet. Losing my way has always been a problem for me, especially losing it to my anger. But, back then I always had my bookends to corral me in.

      In the beginning, I was alone, and now in the end, I am alone. I suppose my equation has come into balance. I am alone and my life is now bound not by love or duty, but by the simple and immeasurably old, rhythms of nature. After bedding down my horse, regardless of the hour, I sleep and awake with the sun. I make coffee and sit barefooted and shirtless, regardless of the temperature, on the top step my little porch and sip it in the silent creeping pink shadow of the false dawn. I take it, the coffee, with a little milk and sugar now. It’s a sort of concession to my new _life_. Black is for work and creamy sweet for breathing in the crisp air of a new day.

      Take a note. New days are not a given. This is a lesson that I learned from a very young age. No man is so entitled and I cherish each and every one. Coffee finished, I retreat inside and eat a meager breakfast, just cereal and some fruit dictated by the season. I have to eat properly, or so my physician claims, because I have done my body a horrible injustice over the years and I now have to pay the price and monitor my blood sugar. Life’s trials are so demeaning. Finally, I dress and tend to my chores. My horse is fed and watered, his stall mucked out and refreshed. Then, I traipse around several crotchety chickens and an ornery rooster while gently and repeatedly nudging aside a goose that flew into my yard a year ago and simply decided to stay while spreading their feed and tidying up my yard. It’s always the same, day in and day out. I care for my new family and then, when the mood hits me, and my house is in order, I sleep. I nap. I nap at the house, or sometimes ride out to my Willow tree. But, this is the end. I was supposed to go back to the beginning. There’s time enough to detail the end.

      It’s the beginnings that you don’t hear about. The world likes to hear about how men like us end their lives. They like to, maybe, need to hear how we dove onto a grenade to save a dignitary, or dashed into machine gun fire to save a brother, or succumbed to drug and drink, and emotional fragmentation before finally taking true charge of our own equation by erasing it from the history of our set, set Human. It happens. I’ve fought that monster all of my life, so I know. I’ve stood at the brink and stared into that abyss of self-gratification, which with one tiny step will free you from the never ending pain you suffering. I’m a Badger though, and I had, have my cete to keep safe. No room for selfish delusions of freedom.

      It’s the beginnings though, that go untold. It’s the beginnings that you rarely get to hear about. You don’t want to know that your heroes began as simply X=, it’s too frightening of a truth. It instills guilt in you to know that what or a man that began as X= has been rendered into X=B, if X is a man and B is broken. You like to keep your hands clean, and your need for that sterility is the primary function which dictates our lives and creates our equations.

 _Salem_ : _March 8 2015, 1543 hours_


	3. Chapter 3

_March 8 2015_

_Part 3_

_Homecoming_

_1913 hours_

 

 

      In the beginning there was just me. I said that before and I say it again, because even then I had no one. I was born into a world of abuse and neglect. I was born on March 8, 1971 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and taken home to the family farm midway between Grosse Tete and West Baton Rouge Parrish. It’s a swamp. We had nothing. I’ve looked it up, and it was a Monday. It was a bitterly cold Monday making a record low of twenty-seven degrees. I hate the cold and when I discovered this fact I couldn’t help but think that this is the reason why.

      According to my birth certificate, which I didn’t lay eyes upon until I shipped out for the Army seventeen years later, I was six pounds even and eighteen and a quarter inches long. It was a bit below average, but not awful. I was named Elliot Nicholas Salem. I have absolutely no idea why. Salem, of course, is my father’s name, but the rest…no clue. I suppose, it may have been a grandfather’s name, or an old buddy of my father’s, but it’s not a regular name. I’ve been asked countless times about it and I truly have no answer. Elliot Nicholas, it’s who I am, I guess, and the reason is of little or no consequence. It definitely didn’t seem like a name my father would come up with. As a matter of fact, some cousin, on my uncle’s wife’s side, told me that a nurse had named me. She told me that my old man didn’t want any part of me, after my mother split; until he found out he could get welfare money for me. It’s just as possible as any other explanation, I suppose. That was the beginning name. Now, I’m Broc Alan Aros, a name is a name and I’ve had many, but the ending name has meaning, meaning that _I_ gave to it. It’s mine.

      I never met my mother. The cert says that her name was Elaine Sheehy-Salem. I was told that she fled the hospital just hours after I was born. That, alone, is enough to make a man wonder about his worth. If your own mother doesn’t want you, well…

      When I was six years old, I stole a Polaroid picture from my old man’s stuff and it had her in it. That’s how I know what she looked like. It was an old, old photo and it showed her standing next to my father smoking a cigarette and drinking a Budweiser. She was fat and round with me. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail and light brown, fairly close to mine in color, but I guess it might have been colored. I couldn’t see the shade of her eyes, but they too seemed light brown. She was a small framed woman, maybe five foot three with an elfin oval-like face and a crooked smile, not unlike mine if I’d actually allow myself to admit, and accept it. I’m a small man too so; maybe that’s where I got my size from as well.

      My father stood close to her, shoulder to shoulder actually, holding a bottle of Old Grand Dad Whiskey in his left hand and in his right a wad of money fanned out like playing cards. He went an easy six-two and was thick with work honed muscle. He was unshaven and wore what I’d learn, as I grew older, amounted to four days’ worth of dark brown stubble. I have his hawkish, blocky nose and his temper I suppose. What sorry luck. A bit of his size and less of his temper would have made my life a hell of a lot simpler. Behind the pair was our little shack of a house.

      I kept the photo hidden and I would sit in the little closet off of the living room, my ‘bedroom’, and study it in the dim light of my little blue Eveready flashlight while listening to my father and his friends drinking, cooking dope and arguing. I memorized every detail of the picture. My mother’s pink and blue Gingham maternity dress and her filthy white Keds sneakers. I tried to imagine what her voice would sound like, but could never settle upon one. I guess she just always sounded like my aunt Rita, or whatever woman teacher I might have at the time.

      My father’s image gets confused with the real him. But, I memorized his bare lightly hairy chest with the ugly cheap tattoo of a skull with a knife through its left eye over his heart and his cut off blue jean shorts. A ragged scar peeked out three inches above their waistline and sliced across the fine line of dark hair beneath his navel from right to left. He had on old army boots that were crusted in mud and older than he was, or so it seemed. I learned later were early Vietnam issue. My uncle claimed that he’d gotten the scar in Vietnam saving his team. I doubted it. He was a piece of shit, my old man. Soldiers weren’t pieces of shit so…To me, that’s how he played out at the time anyway, just a sick piece of shit. Maybe, in a past chapter of his life he’d been a better man. But, he did have those damned boots. He _always_ had those god damned same boots. I hated those boots and the damage they could inflict if I fucked up.

      On a table next to them was a bale of Marijuana, three hand guns, what I know now to be an M-16 and a shot gun. We always had weapons in the house and I can’t remember ever not knowing how to load and use them. Hanging on a shed in the far left were several Nutria skins tacked out neatly, curing. Alongside of them, a string of big fat catfish hung smoking over a pit. The meager grass was mowed and the yard neat.

      The old tin clad roof, clapboard house was, or had once been white, but the paint was chipping and gray with age. Oddly, if you looked very closely, you could see where my father had begun stripping away the old paint. He was working on the place. The windows, framed by red weathered shutters, were still intact, and clean when the photo had been taken. But, just before I turned eight, someone had driven by and shot them out. It was my first time under live fire and I distinctly recall the sound of the rounds ricocheting around our living room. My old man never fixed them. He just boarded them up with tin from the old chicken coop roof. They were smiling, my parents not the windows. Christ, writing is a hard task! I hope that it gets easier as I go. They seemed very happy, maybe, a bit criminal, but happy. So, I always wondered why she would just walk away without me.

      Maybe, she’d tried to save herself. The world of my father, the equation that he was working on, was or turned into, I really don’t know what she’d suffered, a hellish one, and maybe, once she was free from the burden of carrying me, she just up and ran for it. I like to believe that’s what happened. I like to believe that she made it and lived out a good life somewhere nice. Maybe, since we are both fugitives of a sort, I should try to find her. Fuck me, what would I say? Thanks mom. The mere idea sets the anger roiling, begging for release from my chest and that hurts so…I need to just let that idea go, until maybe I get even stronger.

      It was a cold, violent reality, well mine anyway, in our little house though, and a part of me thinks he got rid of her. Maybe, they fought, or she didn’t pull her weight, I don’t know, but he could have just cancelled her from his equation. Family and friends would have covered it for him. Not all cetes are good cetes; after all they left me to his sick devices. The swamp is a big lonely place and keeps its secrets well. The salient point, well points here are that he had me to himself. That she abandoned me, an innocent child, an inequality in that hell at the mercy of his set of variables. There may be no forgiving her ever.

      My father has a brother, well had and he had a wife, Rita. She was kind to me when we visited them down toward New Orleans. Visit is the polite way to say it. It was more like I’d get sent there when the old man was tired of me, or doing time. My fucking…no, I don’t want to say it that way, that’s the old me and I promised myself that I wouldn’t write this in anger. I’ve cancelled anger from my equation. I slip up now and again, but for the most part I’ve tamped it down deep inside of my chest and it actually hurts, physically hurts when, on occasion, I let it sneak out.

      So, my father was always in and out of prison. It might be drugs, or stealing, or poaching or just failing to follow his parole rules, but he was gone a lot. I really don’t remember much before I was three or so, and even then, the memories are dark and more like watching an old, scratchy black and white movie playing behind my eyelids.

      One of them though, is of my old man taking me from Rita by force. It was just after I turned three. I know this, because she gave me a birthday party. She had a cake and we blew the candles out. Four and one for luck, she’d said, and she told me that my birthday was on March eighth. I had no idea when it was before that. I remember her screaming at him to just let me stay. I remember my uncle knocking her out with his fist and I remember clinging to my father’s neck while he repeatedly kicked her with the same army boots that are in that old photo. It seems fitting that this is my first real _color_ memory, because it is also the first beginning that I remember.

      He took me back to our little house, and I suppose that’s when I became x=. Better yet, let’s say, I became X=M. If X is me and M is money. M will be the first variable of my life equation and I would very quickly learn that, as members of the set Human, specifically the set Salem, me and my old man had very little of it legitimately. But, this is where it began. I was his means to an end. A function of having a kid was that the state paid you for having him. So, for my old man: _f_ X=Hhim, where H is his happiness. We had welfare and food stamps and he used it all to fund his crazy parties and illegal activities which earned him even more money. In hindsight, I don’t fucking know why we lived in such squalor! I suppose that for every buck he made, he snorted, gambled, shot up or drank ten more. Regardless, there was never enough. The equation just never balanced out.

      A three year old isn’t good for much by way of earning money, but my father squeezed everything out of having me around that he could. I learned to be a quick study. Learning your tasks prevented getting a beaten so…I filled baggies of pot, I weighed Meth, I cleaned the lab gear and to fill in gaps, he sold me to men who liked little boys to play with. The older I got the more jobs he gave me. I said that the memories are fuzzy, and they are for the most part, but one is crystal clear. One I spent a lifetime tamping it down, so that it couldn’t hurt me. I couldn’t allow the fear and disgust that it created to rule me, or I’d have died before I turned five. I swore to visit all the variables of my equation and that particular memory is sadly, painfully one of them.

      It happened about a year after he took me from Rita’s place. The weather was hot and muggy, and I could smell the smoke of a fire burning out in the swamp south west of our place. That smell, the smell of trees, muck and brush burning, still nauseates me. I was tying fishing leaders to a trout line on our rickety coffee table, when I heard a car pull onto the gravel driveway in our yard. My father stood and peered out of the shredded light blue, sun bleached Gingham curtain that covered the filthy window. He’d been acting strangely all day. I recall feeling anxious about why. He’d taken me down to the river’s edge and bathed me which hardly ever happened unless the social workers were coming round. I just figured that was what was going on. I watched him staring out at the visitor and then, flinched a bit when he rounded on me. His face was stern and I knew the look was meant to make me afraid. I was already well versed in his non-verbal threats. I can still, if I let the memory roam free, hear his voice just as clearly as though it was yesterday.

      “This is important you little fucker.” He’d growled, “You fuck this up and we lose everything. You fuck this up and the fucking tax man takes our place. You hear me?”

      I nodded. I didn’t know what a tax man was, or what I wasn’t supposed to fuck up. When he opened the door a soldier walked in. He was an older man with graying hair, tired blue eyes and coppery hued skin. His lips were taut and held no smile; just, what I’d have to say, in hind sight was resolve. The strange soldier wore three stars on his coat collars and the shiniest shoes that I had ever seen. My father’s gravelly voice had stopped my staring. I remember him barking,

      “Get your ass over here, boy and meet General White.”

      I did and shook the hand that he offered me. It was cool and damp and weak for a General, I thought. The memory is still frightening and starkly vivid, even after all these years. I still detest a weak handshake. I still cringe when replaying the memory of his visage of resolve morphing into a beguiling smile, as he looked down at my innocent face and brushed my wayward bangs from in front of my wide, frightened eyes. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d get to know him really well over the next twelve years.

 _Salem_ : _March 8 2318, hours_


End file.
